Coronavirus, Covid-19, strain S or strain L – or both – is the unannounced candidate in the 2020 presidential race. Democrats have already been calculating how to use the epidemic to make Trump look bad; they haven’t been calculating, much, as to how to protect citizens and residents from the disease, or to restore the pharmaceutical industry to the United States. Hatred will do that: blind the carrier to its contagion, making him, or her, feverish and seeking a point of blame. Trump will do.
Theft is very similar. Where the blind virus can steal a person’s health, mobility, outlook and good nature, so can hatred, equally blind, make off with decorum, civility, kindness, compassion and good sense. Both patients are… sick.
But theft, as any victim of a thief can testify, destroys belief as it reduces one’s economy. A break-in to one’s home, for example, leaves residents distrustful, vulnerable and suspicious. New information coming to those people is filtered through a different set of beliefs than prior to the act of thievery. Eventually, assuming no repetition of the crime, distrust fades, safe feelings return and life goes on. Love for others replaces fear. But what if the nature of the theft is not precisely known… and what if the feeling of one’s safety and privacy having been breeched, one’s familial or even personal integrity being threatened by unrecognized thieves, almost continuously… what does a person believe then?
A person would certainly be angry at the violation, the assault on privacy, safety and personhood. And that feeling would lead a person to be mad at, well… someone – whoever is stealing from him or her. What is being stolen? Who is it that should be punished for the constant thievery?
We live, today, right now, in a world of constant thievery, and among those things being stolen are the traditions of America’s founding. One could posit that history, itself, is being stolen from us as “we” dis-educate our youth and restrict and belittle the beliefs that made the American experiment work and the American Dream real. It’s unsettling. What other thefts are being perpetrated?
Pick a state, any state. How many of its agencies are staffed beyond need and paid beyond reason? How many departments or programs are suspected of malfeasance, misfeasance and corruption, often political? Surely some. Honesty is being stolen every hour of every day. How many have died from opioids? How many from in-hospital errors? How many children in state care were neglected so badly that their health or lives were threatened, perhaps lost? How are such questions answered to the public on whose behalf all such actions are taken? Almost never in full truth, often in blatant deception and cover-up.
We are forced by police power to sacrifice our private properties – the gains from our labors – to PAY for governments that lie to us as normal operating process. It is unsettling. A little anger is justified. If one is not angry, he or she isn’t paying attention.
What about our past 3 years nationally, when one political party conspired with federal agencies and officers to attempt to unseat a president? So many lies were told to us by so many official and “news” organs that the count is without total. The political divisions exposed over the past 20 years have been sharpened so fiercely that the next 20 years are in grave doubt. Taxpayers pay for everyone who works in the federal government and they have been lying to us, all, and never more grotesquely than in the years 2016 through 2019 and through the impeachment of president Trump. They, including many in congress, have lied and stolen from our present and future the innate trust we ought to be able to enjoy with regards to our representatives, so called.
That our heritage has been stolen, tossed away when we weren’t looking, can be realized by noting the groundswell of support for an old communist/socialist as he claims to be the “leader” America needs. Young people, college students, even many adults seem enthralled by attacks on capitalism and free enterprise, the unfairness of success, the inequality of unequal results for unequal efforts. It’s all a matter of “fortune” and “unfortune.” The fortunate ones, regardless of their path to wealth and regardless of the millions of jobs they create and the trillions of tax dollars their enterprises and employees pay to support common goods, should not have any more than they need to live on… the rest to be divided amongst the “unfortunate.”
Truth and reason have been stolen, as have history and fact. And, it is unsettling. Even those espousing socialist nonsense feel stolen-from, although they refuse to recognize what their losses truly are. It makes them hazily angry at the fortunate thieves, for they have no mirrors.
Inheritance far greater than one’s grandmother’s silver has been, is being stolen right from our dining-room buffet, and we have not only left the back door open, we’ve marked the shortest path to the buffet with bright orange duct tape. How can we tell all these thefts have gone on? Check the books, the ledgers of our balance sheets. We’re out of balance. “What happened?” we ask one another. “How did we get $23 Trillion in debt?” “When did it become illegal to separate boys’ and girls’ bathrooms?”
“When did people start to hate others so much that teams of thugs would be allowed to beat them up while police watched?” “Is this what Socialism has done? Made us hate each other?” “They” are stealing our nation. It’s unsettling.